Once we needed the recording industry because making and distributing quality recordings was an industrial process. Now anyone can cheaply make and distribute a quality recording, the challenge is marketing in a crowded marketplace. For a brief period with the CD the music industry got the best of b...

Well Amazon does not run out of digital versions because every time one is downloaded an Amazon employee in their digital warehouse quickly orders a replacement copy from the publisher Do you know that for a fact? After all, if Amazon.com has one copy in digital format on its server, it can technic...

I can't tell the difference between Amazon's 320k MP3 compression and cd audio on my equipment (which in total has a low 4 digit price tag - so decent but not audiophile crazy - and there are numerous double blind studies that tend to show that very few people can tell the difference even in more hi...

Well Amazon does not run out of digital versions because every time one is downloaded an Amazon employee in their digital warehouse quickly orders a replacement copy from the publisher - because the digital versions travel to Amazon so much quicker - at speeds of 400 million miles per hour instead o...

Reger tried to fuse post-Wagnerian chromaticism with traditional forms, the numerous sets of variations are a good place to start, particularly the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart op.132 The Clarinet Quintet is one of his most respected works and the String Quartets are worth the effort Th...

https://johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com/2016/03/17/birthday-playlist-for-finnissy-at-70/ Few living composers have an output as large and as diverse as Michael Finnissy does. On the occasion of his 70th birthday, I’ve tried to reflect that in a little playlist, along with some brief thoughts on what I...

Kreuz market in Lockhart is the real deal, so the NYC branch ought to be legit Houston is privileged in that there are any number of quality BBQ joints plus a deli nt far from my office which is as good as anything in NYC http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-deli-man-feature-20150305...

If you read an economics textbook you learn that efficient market sets the price of a commodity just above the production cost. If it doesn't - it does not work. that is not so. The definition of an efficient market is one that does not allow risk-free arbitrage, prices reflect all available inform...

Like this http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2458 We analyze the time pattern of the activity of a serial killer, who during twelve years had murdered 53 people. The plot of the cumulative number of murders as a function of time is of "Devil's staircase" type. The distribution of the intervals between murder...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-koch-this-is-the-one-issue-where-bernie-sanders-is-right/2016/02/18/cdd2c228-d5c1-11e5-be55-2cc3c1e4b76b_story.html The senator is upset with a political and economic system that is often rigged to help the privileged few at the expense of everyone el...

The infrastructure bit is a canard made up by the American Society of Civil Engineers which is nothing more than a lobbying group representing the self-interest of its members. Politicians like Sanders of course love infrastructure spending because it gives them more power through having contracts t...

Actually not much of one. The Scandinavian countries are actually much more business-friendly than the US is currently and way more so than Sanders would have it. The lesson Bernie Sanders needs to learn is that you cannot finance a Danish-style welfare state without free markets and large tax incre...

I didn't think he was writing about Danae and Zeus. :D Sorry, I think that piece is just a pile of invective for its own sake, attack rather than argument, and a waste of ink. The author, who hides behind the pseudonym "Throwcase," has written all kinds of frivolous stuff - see here: http://www.thr...

Another point - the composer is not the final word on his composition -the community of performers is. Prokofiev is within living memory - why has no one played his works like the example above? Why is prokofiev even considered worthy of performance? The answer to both questions is that the performi...

The golden shower rebuke is well deserved - the diversity and quality of musical performances available today, either through recordings or concerts, dwarfs anything in the past. Music seems to be the only art that has this fetish about past performing practice. I do not see arguments for a lost gol...

The notion that while the government cannot ban a book based on its content but can restrict the expenditure of the funds necessary to publish the book is the ridiculous and unconstitutional canard of 'money = speech' that the court wisely threw out

I think Taruskin commented on the HIP movement something to the effect of 'its not historically accurate, but sounds good anyway' which would go with the golden shower bloggers point. I prefer Berman's more straight rhythm, but am an unrepentant modernist and not much of a Prokofiev fan. For contemp...

through corporate money spending unlimited amounts on campaign ads, why are Sanders and Trump doing so well? Or perhaps we should be grateful to the Supreme Court for protecting the First Amendment against needless fear-mongering and self-interested incumbent politicians wanting to further entrench ...

I respectfully disagree that the Roman Empire did not decline. As years went by, the currency was debased, inflation and public debt rose, the general public was passive and increasingly failed to participate or protest (this was the origin of the satirist Juvenal's phrase "panem et cirenses"), pub...

I agree that football will be dead in a generation Not that soon, if ever. It's an economic powerhouse for the owners, for television, for colleges and universities, and other vested interests, and there's no other sport or programming to take its place on autumn and winter Saturday and Sunday afte...

Sports advertising has become much more valuable in recent years as these events have become just about the only thing that people watch live anymore. Makes sense that companies would allocate their marketing budgets accordingly. The real scam is the taxpayer dollars that go to subsidize stadiums. A...

Had to click on that, didnt you? Excellent takedown of these classical music has gone to hell in a handbasket whine pieces: http://www.throwcase.com/2015/01/20/the-golden-shower-of-musicology/ As a classical musician I have often had to grimace through many incarnations of the argument that classica...

No, jbuck's post is Chang conducting. The interesting thing about messiaen's music is that it really blossomed and became fully realizied after he absorbed post-war modernism. Hindemith never left neoclassicism and stravinsky adopted serial techniques in his own idiosyncratic way. Messiaen produced ...

Not evolution,vaccine or global warming denialism - none of these will potentially deny food to poor people. The most dangerous current anti science movement is anti-GMO hysteria: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-08/bc-g-081915.php Nina Fedoroff, molecular biologist and former Science and...

There is also Kent Nagano, which I have in the Messiaen Edition boxed set of Erato and Teldec recordings: http://www.amazon.com/Messiaen-Edition-18CD-Olivier/dp/B000A2ACWO But the Myung Whun Chang is the one to have if push comes to shove. I love the work, but think his later orchestral pieces like ...

Just being sarcastic in the headline, scientists have genetically engineered the tree to come back and withstand the fungus that nearly killed it off. American chestnut trees were once among the most majestic hardwood trees in the eastern deciduous forests, many reaching 80 to 120 feet in height and...

http://reason.com/archives/2016/01/15/liberals-are-simple-minded Not suprisingly, those psychological studies that purport to show conservatives as simple minded and dogmatic are biased. When corrected for liberal dogmatic hotpoints, like environmentalism, Liberals measure to be equally simple minde...

Two 9-11 truthers are walking down the street when a drunk driver runs over and kills them. As the stand at the Heavenly gates, God asks "Any questions before you enter?" "Yes, what Reeaally happened on 9-11?"' One asks "Well", God says, "Some Muslim terrorists hijacked some airliners and crashed th...